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A New Zealand man, for reasons only clear to himself, decides to attempt a Starsky & Hutch drift around a corner in a ute that can only kindly be described as vintage. With that opening, you're no doubt expecting the obligatory "of course it all goes wrong and he crashes."

BRRRAAAAP! It's music to the ears of a subset of car nuts. Noisy exhaust setups are hardly a new phenomenon, but the fashion for mufflers that intentionally buzz as much as possible is a more recent development in the pantheon of annoying things others do. Exasperation with the muffler rap has led a New Zealand vigilante to start terrorizing cars equipped with what he or she describes as "boy-racer exhausts" in a written manifesto sent to the Marlborough Express.

There are a number of devices on the market that can plug into a car's OBD II diagnostic communication port to extract vehicle data. The latest to appear is PLX Devices' Kiwi. Unlike most of the others, which simply display raw mileage data, the Kiwi apparently logs a variety of vehicle information such as throttle and brake data. It uses this in combination with the mileage info to analyze your driving style and give you advice on how to get the most out of a gallon of fuel. It also includes a

Land Transport New Zealand's latest vehicle statistics found that Kiwis were changing their buying habits as fuel prices stay high. First, new and used car registrations were down last month. Second, of the cars sold in New Zealand in the first half of this year, 40 percent were small car models, up from 30 percent a year earlier. Third, motorbike sales were up for the 27th month in a row. The New Zealand Motor Trade Association said the decline in car sales was due in part to higher than averag